Ipod as a removable drive

I am a new Ipod owner(30gig). I am not real happy with Itunes and the way it works . So I have been looking at software to bypass it. Allot of what I am finding assumes windows sees the Ipod as a removable drive on "my computer". My ipod does not show up on my pc. Is there something wrong? is there some kind of software I need to correct this? And finally what do you think about these applications that allow you to transfer files without using I tunes . I tried one and it did something to my ipod and I spent the day getting it to work again.